Case Study: Leica Geosystems achieves IT consolidation and LAN-like application performance with Riverbed Steelhead appliances

Leica Geosystems consolidates IT infrastructure and accelerates application performance with Steelhead appliances

Leica Geosystems, a global measurement-technology company in the Hexagon Group with over 3,500 employees and dozens of small offices worldwide, faced rising IT costs after rapid branch expansion. The original approach—running two local servers per office for Notes, SAP, file services and CRM—became prohibitively expensive, so IT sought to consolidate infrastructure into three data centers but worried this would degrade application performance.

Leica deployed 21 Riverbed Steelhead appliances to accelerate WAN traffic and simplify branch setup, enabling consolidation to three central sites. Results included LAN-like application performance (application downloads 30% faster), 40–60% lower bandwidth use, removal of roughly 20–30 branch servers, centralized backups, and restored usability of web CRM in Asia.

Leica Geosystems

Ingo Peterlunger

IT Global Network Engineer